One of most amusing and revealing episodes of the Chinese cultural revolution was the fact that when hundreds of thousands of inspired youths flooded Peking in 1966, they found that each contingent wore button badges announcing its city, but some badges were scarcer and thus rarer than others. Immediately and spontaneously a market arose in which different badges were traded at discount. Youths proudly showed off the scarce badges they were able to get by trade -as they demonstrated against the restoration of capitalism and for the cultural revolution.

The market flourishes anywhere, as soon as it is given a chance. Even in the crevices of totalitarian systems. A rather depressing realization for the socialists. Lenin had to admit it in 1921, when he established the NEP, thus abandoning the original -purely socialist- economic system the Soviets had imposed. And Primo Levi explains in detail (in his Auschwitz memoirs: "If this is a man") how a primitive market thrived in the most oppressive environment thinkable (the concentration camp): cigarrettes were the currency unit, shirts were traded against crumbs of bread, there was even a "stocks exchange", etc. The Jews from Salonika (Spanish-speakers, by the way: you know, Sefardites) were particularly skilled for this traffic.